Many Colors on the American Palette

                                                                                     

My grandmother's immigration photo, circa 1918

     I was fifteen years old, visiting my grandmother, when “they” killed President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Like most Americans, I grieved, not only because he was president but also because he was an Irish Catholic, and the Irish nuns and brothers who educated me talked about him in damn-near saintly language, same as my Catholic Mexican-Democrat working-class family who revered Kennedy. My dad was a “union man,” who told me he’d have no healthcare, pension, or vacation days without the AFL-CIO and support of the Democrats. 

     The son of Mexican immigrants, my dad was one of the first natural born U.S. citizen in his family. My guess is none of us really understood the politics of the day; although, not much has changed, but one thing, when JFK died, the entire country grieved—as one. Then we went back to the old political game. The Republicans cut taxes for the rich, while Democrats spent them on social programs for the poor, and the working-class got the shaft, or so that's how it was framed. Sound familiar? And that was sixty-two years ago. Talk about “same tired old playbook.” 

     What do you expect when there's only a two-party system, or the semblance of a “two” party system? The progressive party has morphed into a “big-tent” party straddling the “middle,” while, according to pundits, the conservative party has been hijacked by a “cult-like” figure who refuses to go along with the “program” because he didn’t win the last election, and his party, or those remaining, follow him to the fringes, his main gripe: immigrants without legal documentation are murderers and rapists and running rampant, destroying our country. He said he heard it was so bat that in Springfield, Ohio, immigrants “are eating the dogs and cats.” 

     I, and many Americans, can deal with an immigrant-bashing political campaign strategy. It’s been going on for years, and there is an argument to be made, but objective scholarly studies show immigrants, illegal or otherwise, work hard, pay taxes, and commit fewer crimes than most citizens, and nobody can prove they're eating cats and dogs. 

     I entered the military in 1966, and I realized America, culturally, was, much broader than I was led to believe in my sheltered corner of Los Angeles, an ethnically integrated neighborhood sandwiched between Santa Monica and Westwood. It really hit me when I arrived in Vietnam and saw how many different types of people saw themselves as Americans. 

     I made friends with guys from everywhere, places I’d never heard of, like the Virgin Islands, home to my buddy Ronny La Beet, a black Virgin Islander who spoke with a French accent. Jerry Lugo was a Puerto Rican New Yorker with a Bronx accent. There was Jack Brun, a homespun Arkansan, a kind-hearted kid who played the Gomer Pyle role but was smarter than a whip. Thomas Simmons, a bible-reading black kid from Alabama, was quiet and always respectful, sometimes embarrassed by the urban Black guys who called him, "Country." One of my closest friends was Joe Bel-Air, a handsome blonde hair, blued eyed kid from Sante Fe Springs, east of Downtown L.A. Jonathan Bolan, a high-I.Q. hippie, always with a book in hand, hailed from Indio, California, and Robert Elliot who scolded us Southern Californians for calling his hometown “Frisco” instead of San Francisco. 

     There was Alex Mayo, a reservation Indian from Wyoming, and Montana cowboy, Big Tom Waylon, and West Virginia and Pennsylvania coal miners’-kids, Wayne Podlesnik and Nick Samuels. Of course, there were many Mexicans, a bunch from all over L.A. and small-town boys from the San Joaquin Valley. The guys from Texas, especially the Rio Grande Valley, spoke Spanish much better than English. Talk about a multi-cultural America. 

     Nobody questioned the legal status of kids from Mexico who came across the border to volunteer. Hell, Puerto Rico wasn’t even a state, and the government lowered the language requirement to draft them. Filipinos filled the ranks, mainly among the NCO’s who’d fought in WWII. Guys who came from Guam and the Dominican Republic shed their blood when many Mainland Americans refused to go. 

     It's annoying when I hear people say the U.S. is a “White,” Christian country. Though they wouldn't admit it, a few founding fathers, like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin saw themselves more as agnostics than believers in Christ. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Confusions, agnostics, and atheists made their home here and served in the military going back to the Revolutionary War. In the 1700's, ships entering Boston and New York Harbors brought in traders from around the world, including Russians, Syrians, Africans, and Chinese. In Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick, the “Pequod” carried sailors from around the world, some who could barely communicate in English but worked as a team on board the whaling vessel. 

     This multi-ethnic, multi-religious representation of the real America isn’t an anomaly. When I talked to my dad about the different guys I me in the army, kind of jokingly, he said it was the same during his time in the service. He said he met guys from everywhere, and of all colors and ethnicities, a polyglot of languages. Today, I assume, its ditto for the men and women serving around the world. 

     It’s no secret the CIA has always recruited from university foreign language, literature, psychology, and anthropology departments, men and women who studied folklore and culture. The spy agency sought naturalized citizens who came from other countries and understood the customs of others. How can we spy on foreign countries if our agents can’t blend in and speak the languages or understand cultures abroad? John Steinbeck wrote of those who came here from other lands, "...not the best but the worst. The hungry are ambitious...the hurt and hunted carry the dream of justice, the driven most likely to make a stand...This was our strength and our foundation." (America and Americans) 

     This is the real America, but you’d never know it listening to politicians who rail about the “browning of American” and the poisoning of our culture, but what culture is that? We've never had one culture, and we’re not browning as a nation. We’ve always been multi-colored, from the time Dutch and English pilgrims meandered about the shores of Plymouth, trading with the native people, who numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. 

     If not for the Iroquois Confederacy, the White strangers from different shores would not have lasted a winter here. In a 1784 essay titled, “Savages, We Call Them,” Benjamin Franklin, "Clearly [did] not regard Native Americans as savages. The 'savages' are, in fact, as civilized or more civilized than Whites; it is the Whites who must rely on force, punishment, and prisons to enforce good behavior." Native people had none of these. They adhered to their customs and cultural practices of their people to survive.

     If you’ve never left your home or travelled the country, you wouldn’t really understand what Woody Guthrie meant when he sang, “This land is Your Land/ This land is my land/ From California to the New York Island.” The "your" is plural, and it intends to include the many and not the few.

     I’m not sure there are many homogenous locations remain in the country, “all one color.” Even in Ohio Amish country, the locals mix with immigrants who have moved in to neighboring towns to do the work the locals won’t do. Drive down through the Rio Grande Valley and, though it's dominated by Mexicans, there are plenty of Whites, Syrians, and Chinese who have been there for generations. 

     Maybe in places like Pine Ridge, South Dakota, you might find only Lakota, but they aren't isolated. Rapid City is close by. In Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, states whose towns were once nearly all black and white, times change, like in parts of California’s Orange County, all Vietnamese, and L.A.’s Monterrey Park, Chinese, Koreans, and Latinos. Put them all together, that’s a lot of colors on the American palette. The best artists are those who know how to use all the colors, or as the Mexican folksong goes, "Y por eso los grandes amores de muchos colores me gustan a mi."